


Brightwind

by KittyViolet



Category: New Mutants, X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Fate & Destiny, Gen, Horseback Riding, Religious Discussion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-09
Updated: 2018-04-09
Packaged: 2019-04-20 19:39:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14268141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KittyViolet/pseuds/KittyViolet
Summary: Dani has some heavy thoughts about riding, and about what being a Valkyrie means.





	Brightwind

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place between New Mutants (vol 1, 1980s series) numbers 41 and 44.

The truth is I was also afraid of horses. Since childhood, truly, safe as I still felt then, in Colorado, in Wyoming, in the mountains, before the bear, before powers, I was already afraid.

I loved riding anyway. I still love it. I wish I could ride, here, daily. Back in Colorado, from March to November I rode every day. There was the chestnut mare, Windy, and then the grey colt I called Daisy—so fierce that I gave her the name in the hope it could tame her—and the midnight-colored one, Cold Stream And I did love them all. I loved to feel both independent and safe, taken care of, able to guide a weighty, kind, willful creature, muscles rippling under me, scent of sweat and hay on the mane. 

I loved the feeling that I had learned this thing, riding horseback, and I could remember learning. I could remember not knowing how. Before I was thirteen—before my powers came to me, before I could strike fear into anyone else—I knew how to take a horse where I wanted to go. 

And yet I was already afraid, with a kind of undercurrent, a chill in the air, a voice that told me every time I threw my awkward not-yet-tall body over a saddle, every time I balanced myself and took hold of both reins, that I was moving towards something terrible, learning something I did not want to know.

And now I know. 

When I rode Windy, when I rode Cold Stream, I was becoming the girl who would someday ride Brightwind; the figure of valor, the rider for my forever horse-friend, for the animal that knows me in ways that no human can, but also the predictor and selector of the dead. He is the best thing in my life, some days, and also part of the worst. 

Because it’s one thing to know what people fear—I had almost got used to that, and after all so many fears are irrational, extreme, unpredictable, harmless in real life, visions of something that just isn’t going to come true, or something you can survive even if it did.

But now I know, sometimes, what fears are going to come true. Not fears, but fates. And not all fates; just the ones most people dread.

And this fate is mine; I accept it, I love what I can. I love Brightwind’s mane, and his flanks, and his tail, and the way he doesn’t need armor, and the way he thinks he can be my armor, and the feeling of being surrounded on all sides by air. I love the way he speaks to me without speaking, and the way that I don’t even need to speak to him.

And, sometimes, I love the feeling that I am doing what the spirits want me to do. 

I wish I could make that whole idea clear in one language. When I think about spirits, now, I find myself switching back and forth, and it takes a real effort, among American English, and the language of my grandparents, and what Doug told me must be Old Norse. If I don’t make the effort I can’t understand what I know.

Because Ma’heo’o isn’t Odin, and people who think it means “All-Father” are wrong. But Ma’heo’o does have many names. I learned some of them in childhood, and others from reading, just as I learned about Xi’an’s God, who also saves.

They are names for what has to be. Odin and Ma’heo’o and the others, the names Kitty knows, and the names Ororo has used, and maybe even the names Amara swears by, are names for powers—separate powers, maybe, but powers allied, and great enough to dictate how the universe should go, powers that have been doing so for a long time, powers it’s not our business to oppose. 

There are other powers we must oppose. They are are the powers that that want to drag Illyana away forever, to make her the queen of that incomprehensible place and tell her she can never leave; they are the powers that want to keep Rahne in her box of fears disguised as faith, and the powers that tell me I’ll never belong in the East, and never feel at home. Those powers were in the Bear; they were part of its anger. It think it was angry at me for leaving my first home; that kind of power gets angry at human beings for making new friends, for wanting to change and grow. I still have dreams with the Bear in them, but now he feels more like two Bears, and the one that's still alive is one that can live in the wild, that can't hurt me, that is able to let me go.

I think Doug knows more than he tells me about those powers, the ones that seem to engulf half my friends; I wish I could speak his languages, their languages, half as well as he can speak mine.

But he can’t do what I do, what I could not do without Brightwind, what no one else my age (so far as I know) can do; I follow the dictates of Odin, of time itself, of Ma’heo’o, of fate, of the lines in the sky.

Kitty should understand—she’s been to the future; but for her the future is not the future, just one among many possible futures. Science girl understands branching timelines, and complicated math, and never gives up; for her the end never has to be the end. I like that in her. I think it comes from having so many close scrapes, or maybe from her kind of lonely, talky, sociable untouchability, or maybe from spending so much time as the youngest one on the mission, or in the room. Once she told me—I think Illyana and Xi’an were in that particular room— that she couldn’t get through the day if she thought there was only one future, only one version of her. There’s always more than one. All of us together are always making, deciding, figuring out which one we get.

I get scared when I look at Illyana these days. I tell myself that she, among all of us, knows how to come back from there. I tell myself that I am sure she can. She saved me. Nobody else could.

But when I look at all of them even now, after we’ve come back again— and I know this won’t be the last time— I can still see so much to fear, so many ends. I know why I was scared of horses, then—they meant I would someday ride one that could fly; they meant I could not only gallop but soar, and see the future, and seeing the future means seeing the end.

 

Is there an end after the end? for all my friends, or for some of them, or for me?

Am I almost immortal, now, like the other Valkyries? Is some part of me going to die, as my friends can die, while another part will probably live as long as Odin’s heavenly city, as long as the mountains and glaciers and their stones? It’s something Brightwind knows, just as Brightwind knows where the sun is coming from, or whether I’m in danger, or what to eat. But it is not something he will tell me. That’s how a horse and her rider, together, can take joy in each other, and go on to do our dark work.

And sometimes there’s an end after the end; sometimes what’s been ordained is a narrow escape, the shadow of something terrible that is nothing more than a shadow, a passing cloud. I have seen shadows too; not all of them stay.

My own Brightwind. We can be ourselves together. You can show me what I need to know.

**Author's Note:**

> I am not Native American, much less Cheyenne, have no more claim to write Native characters or spiritual systems than anyone else non-Native, and have never tried to write one before; if you see anything inaccurate or disrespectful in Dani's version of her inheritance, please let me know in comments and I'll make a correction (or take the whole thing down).
> 
> It's at least possible that Dani has read Louise Glück's poem "Horse."


End file.
